Representing a small state in a volatile region, Omani officials have created diplomatic spaces that permit them to engage with regional issues on their own terms and in ways that play to their strengths. As Sayyid Badr Albusaidi, a career diplomat who became the Omani foreign minister in 2020, noted back in 2003, “We try to make use of our intermediate position between larger powers to reduce the potential for conflict in our immediate neighborhood.”

Unlike Qatar, which has attracted worldwide attention over its role as a mediator in Hamas-Israel negotiations, Oman engages less in mediation and more in facilitation.

This is an important distinction and one the Omanis have maintained in regards to engaging with U.S. and Iranian officials, as well as Saudi and Houthi representatives during the decade-long Yemeni civil war.

Omani facilitation takes varied forms. It can consist of passing messages and maintaining indirect channels of communication between adversaries or arranging back channels and hosting discreet meetings.

There is little of the publicity seen in Qatar’s mediation initiatives, such as the talks with the Taliban that produced the 2020 Doha Agreement for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan.

But Oman’s approach can nonetheless yield results. In his memoir, “The Back Channel,” written after his retirement from the State Department and before his appointment as President Joe Biden’s director of the CIA, William Burns provided a detailed account of the Omani role in facilitating the back channel between U.S. and Iranian officials in 2013 that evolved into negotiations that produced the the Iran nuclear deal of 2015.

That back channel began after Iranian officials passed a message through Oman to the U.S. in 2012 suggesting a meeting in Muscat, the Gulf state’s capital.

Burns recalled that the head of Omani intelligence “greeted both delegations as we walked into the meeting room” and “offered a few brief words of welcome and then departed.”

The back channel remained secret throughout eight rounds of generally constructive dialogue that marked the longest and most sustained engagement between Iranian and U.S. officials since 1979.

While the thaw between the U.S. and Iran didn’t last, the Omani back channel highlighted several factors key to the success of any attempt to dial down tensions between seemingly implacable adversaries.

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